Moments

An Excerpt from HUNTING IN THE SHADOWS,   a Memoir by Mike Watson – soon to be published.

A Caper in Saigon

South Vietnam, as a nation, faced a full-scale Communist insurgency.  This saw the countryside wracked with violence, while at the same time Saigon, the capital, remained relatively peaceful.  Notwithstanding there had been a number of bombings and shootings, Saigon, in contrast to some other Asian cities, was much quieter, with its shaded, tree-lined streets, avenues, and boulevards, footpath cafes (these, particularly those catering to foreigners, would later disappear, unfortunately, as the insurgency progressed), and tiled roofed colonial villas.  Although there were signs that this was a city at war, they were not obtrusive at this time.

Having said this, Saigon and Cholon were home to members of at least two Viet Cong sapper battalions.  They were not concentrated though.  Their members were spread out in squads of six or seven in safe houses across the two cities, most frequently in the canal-side slum areas.  They fit in there, and the canals allowed them to come and go surreptitiously, as they conducted their clandestine activities.

Our team had been assigned to eliminate a squad of seven sappers, who resided in a safe house amongst the slums, on the banks of the Thi Nghe Canal, not far from the Bong Bridge.  Why despatch, rather than arrest and interrogate, you might ask.  For a number of reasons.  First, the sappers were the Viet Cong elite.  In most instances, the cadre was highly trained and highly motivated.  Many of them were trained to resist interrogation if caught.  Second, there were seven of them, so any attempt at an arrest would, in all probability, erupt into a major gunfight.  Third, we had no way of knowing how many more Viet Cong might be in the immediate vicinity.  Our targets, on this occasion, came from either the 9^th Sapper Battalion or the C-10 Sapper Battalion, both of which were operating in Saigon and Cholon at the time.

Surveillance had established that the three houses, on both sides of the sapper’s safe house, were vacant.  Whether these houses’ previous occupants had vacated their residences voluntarily or had been forced out by the sappers, I do not know.  Knowing that these sapper squads usually kept large quantities of explosives in their safe houses, we decided that we would blow the place up with them in it.  With the three houses, on either side of the target house vacant, we would be able to reduce the likelihood of collateral damage.  Collateral damage did not particularly concern us, but we always tried to avoid causing too much inconvenience to the poor and the refugees.  This was not as altruistic as it sounds.  We had an ulterior motive in that we needed their support, even if it was only their silence or their turning a blind eye, on occasions when we undertook our covert activities.

The houses along the Thi Nghe Canal, in the vicinity of the Bong Bridge, could only be described as slums, and even that is being polite.  These areas had always been there, along the banks of the various canals, but were starting to build up in other areas of the city as the insurgency progressed.  These particular houses were built on wooden stilts, out over the water, with a balcony on the side of the house facing the canal, and the other side of the house opened onto a narrow, muddy lane which eventually gave access to more established roadways.  On the opposite side of the narrow, muddy lane to the target premises, was a thick, solid, concrete, and stone wall that was once an old French factory built in the late 1800s.  Given the date of its alleged construction and the solidity of its building, it was, possibly, built originally as a fortification or defensive work of some kind.

The wooden walls of the houses were a faded grey color, the boards heavily weathered, with the occasional piece of rusted corrugated iron sheeting replacing missing boards.  The window spaces had no glass and were covered by weather-beaten flaps of canvas.  The roofs were thatched with dusty palm fronds.  Even in the condition they were in, the occupants of these houses were better off than the even poorer people, who lived in ramshackle shanties made from cardboard and flattened oil or beer cans.  Many of the lowest on the poverty scale lived in the large, concrete drainage pipes, stacked up along some of the streets in the city, put there in preparation for an upgrade to the sewer system.

As with all the canals in, and around, Saigon, the Thi Nghe Canal was tidal.  The water, which was filthy and putrid smelling, rose and fell.  At the high-water mark, the water crested just under the floorboards of the houses.  Low tide exposed a vast expanse of black, foul-smelling, viscous mud.  This oozing mud had an indeterminate depth.  There were frequently dead dogs, cats, and other wildlife in evidence.  We also saw the occasional human body, including both adults and children.  Strangely, despite living in such close proximity to water, very few of the people could swim.  Given the putrid nature of the water, swimming in it would probably have been a health hazard anyway.

For the operation we had acquired three small sampans, each about twelve feet in length.  We intended to lodge two of the sampans, laden with Semtex plastique explosives, under the target house before detonating them.  The Semtex originated from Czechoslovakia, then in the Soviet Bloc.  Our unit had a large supply of it which we, and several of the other Action Teams, used liberally.  We planned to use the third sampan as our getaway craft.  During the afternoon, preceding the night of the operation, we prepositioned the three sampans alongside a derelict wharf, about five hundred meters upstream from the Bong Bridge.  We also brought a two-and-a-half-ton truck, what the Americans called a deuce and a half, carrying the blocks of Semtex plastique.

We brought six of the Nung security detail from headquarters, including their commander, Mister Quang, with us in addition to our six team members.  Mister Quang, who was born in China, was also a Nung, one of that hereditary tribe of Chinese mercenaries then famed throughout Asia for their military prowess.  A graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy, in what had then been the City of Canton, in the old Nationalist Republic of China, he had fought in the Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) Army, before the Communist takeover in 1949.  Following the takeover, he crossed into the then French Indochina.  He fought for the French, prior to their withdrawal, and now fought for the Americans and the Republic of Vietnam.

After we off-loaded the explosives from the truck, two of the Nungs drove it to a location about a kilometer downstream from the Bong Bridge.  There they secured our intended rendezvous point, located on the canal bank.  Mister Quang and the other Nungs would join them, with our other two vehicles, after we left the wharf on our mission.

Suong took charge of the explosives.  She, along with her working partner Minh, appeared to have an affinity for them.  Having watched her work with them, during our initial training program, I would say she was brilliant.  They both carefully supervised the rest of us packing the blocks of orange, brick coloured explosive, into the sampans.  She then asked the rest of us to return to the wharf, so that she and Minh could complete their work in peace.  Suong organized it this way: after we had the sampans in place, under the house, she would chain the two vessels explosive charges together.  She would use pencil detonators, with a fifteen minute delay, giving us time to get well clear.  As these sappers were considered what is now called a high value target, she intended doubling up on the number of detonators she used, to ensure the explosives exploded properly.

Curfew started at midnight, by which time all Americans, both military and civilian, and all Vietnamese civilians, were required to be off the streets.  About fifteen minutes before the beginning of the curfew, we received a final update from our surveillance team.  All seven sappers were in residence, together with four young Vietnamese females, who appeared to be Viet Cong rather than local hookers, judging by their mannerisms and dowdy, unflattering manner of dress.

The canal water level rose with the incoming tide, as we planned.  The rise was not as fast as we had expected though.  We advised the surveillance team that the mission was on, and they advised that they were pulling out.  As we pushed our sampans away from the wharf, Mister Quang and the remaining Nungs departed for the rendezvous point.

Keeping close together in the deep shadows, we half drifted half paddled our vessels towards the Bong Bridge.  We tried to keep the paddling to a minimum, as the paddles stirred up the water and the putrid, rotten, smell, became almost unbreathable.  As it was, the night air was very hot, very humid, and it was almost like breathing water vapour.  Nga and I were in the lead, in the getaway sampan, followed by the explosive laden sampan containing Suong and Khan, which was followed by the second explosive laden sampan containing Minh and Dung.  Khan and Dung were our team’s watercraft experts.  Both of Hakka descent, they had grown up on the junks, sampans, and other small watercraft along the Cholon waterfront, and on what the French had called the Chinese Arroyo.  What they did not know about boats, large and small, and the handling of them, was not worth knowing.

Whether the Directing Staff at our initial training course had foreseen the six of us teaming up, both on the course and prior to our Vung Tau mission, I do not know.  That all six of us had a capacity with English and French, to a greater or lesser degree, might have had something to do with it.  We had Suong and Minh, who were our explosives specialists, Khan and Dung, who were our watercraft specialists, and Nga and I who, for want of a better expression, you could probably say we were the “snatch” and “despatch” specialists.  We were all shooters though, when it came down to it, and the need arose.

We very carefully approached the Bong Bridge, still keeping to the deep shadows and letting the boats drift with the water flow.  On occasion, there were checkpoints established on either end of the bridge at nightfall.  On this particular night, there were none.  Usually, the checkpoints were manned by White Mice (Vietnamese Police), who were very trigger happy. They shot at anything that moved, including shadows.  Sometimes low-level Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) units manned the check points.  They were just as trigger happy as the White Mice and shot at anything and everything.  Very occasionally, a highly competent ARVN unit was brought in, established the checkpoints, and very thoroughly checked everything and everybody.  If it was an Airborne or Ranger unit, nothing got past them.

Having successfully negotiated our way along the canal and under the Bong Bridge, we arrived at the target house.  All was in darkness and the night was quiet, save for the usual nocturnal sounds of a city asleep.  Nga and I secured our sampan to one of the stilts and covered the premises with our suppressed weapons, mine a Sterling submachine gun, and hers, a Swedish K submachine gun (Carl Gustaf M/45).

Personally, I would have preferred an Australian Owen submachine gun, also known as the Owen Machine Carbine, where the magazine protruded from the top, but unfortunately, none were available.  Of the three, the Owen Gun, the Swedish K, and the Sterling submachine gun, in my opinion the Owen Gun was the better weapon.  Developed during the Second World War, it had seen service with Australians, both then and since, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the Southwest Pacific, and in the ice and snow of Korea.  It was, to my mind, a rugged weapon, equally at home in the heat, the humidity, the mud, and the wet of the tropical jungle, as it was in the cold, snow, sleet, rain, and mud, of much colder climes.  The only problem with the Owen Gun, for our type of work, was that there had never been a suppressed version developed.  However, I am sure, had any been available, the unit’s armorer could have come up with something.

The other team members had Swedish Ks too, but I did not like them as the magazine protruded from the bottom whereas, on the Sterling, it protruded from the side.  Although all submachine guns are not easy to fire from the prone position, the downwards placement of the Swedish K’s magazine made this extremely difficult.  Although all three weapons fired from the open bolt position, leaving them open to ingesting debris, in my opinion and experience, of the two choices available, the Sterling was better designed to cope with this problem.  Others, I know, including a very good American friend of mine, a former United States Navy SEAL lieutenant commander, would choose to disagree.  We have had, on many occasions, friendly discussions on this point, and have come to the amicable conclusion that it is something on which we will agree to disagree.

Khan and Dung expertly slid their respective sampans between the stilts, and under the house with barely a sound, other than the slapping and murmuring of the water, and secured them to stilts by lengths of rope.  Nga and I eased our sampan under the house, allowing Khan and Dung to board.  After they did so, we held the sampan there while Suong and Minh completed their work.  As this happened, the water level in the canal slowly rose.  Very shortly thereafter, Suong and Minh also boarded our getaway sampan.  Suong said that we had some fifteen minutes to get ourselves clear.  Very slowly Nga and I brought our sampan out from under the house and, still keeping close to the canal bank, and in the deep shadows, made our way down the canal towards the rendezvous point.

As we approached the rendezvous point, we heard the sound of an explosion, almost immediately followed by a very much larger one (secondary explosion), which lit up the night sky with an orange glow.  When we turned to look back, we could see flames leaping into the air.  Signalling, with a red-lensed torch, towards the rendezvous point we received the correct answering signal from Mister Quang.  Throwing caution to the winds we paddled hard, towards the steps leading up from the canal, to where a footpath ran along the canal bank.

There we were met by Mister Quang and the Nungs, together with our vehicles.  We drove swiftly with headlights blazing, through the deserted Saigon streets to our headquarters on the Saigon-Bien Hoa Highway.  A number of White Mice patrols, in their Jeeps, were passed on the way, but they very wisely chose to ignore us.  Mister Quang and the Nungs were based at the headquarters and our team, because of the lateness of the hour, and the morning operational debriefing stayed there for the remainder of the night also.

The old adage says, if you choose to lay down with dogs, you will get fleas.  The moral here, if there is one, applied to the four unidentified females spending the night at the sapper’s safe house is, if you choose to lay down with Viet Cong sappers, you will get blown up with them.

Bullet Points:

** The Washington Times reports that a Chinese-American bank supplied Senate Republicans with records showing millions of dollars flowing from Chinese companies to presidential son, Hunter Biden, and Joe’s brother James Biden, said a lawmaker spearheading an investigation of the first family. Was this the CCP’s way of telling the President to play nice or else?

** More from Ukraine Laundry – A former Obama administration staffer declared that he is willing to testify under oath that in 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a “kickback scheme.” The ex-Obama staffer alleged that the kickback scheme included Hunter Biden and Ukrainian gas firm Burisma.

** (USA TODAY) “And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” she added. “Ask yourself who is the real enemy. Young low-level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”

** Spend-Spend-Spend — (CNSNews.com) – The federal deficit topped $1 trillion in the first six months of fiscal 2023 (October through March), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

** 2024 – Biden has been able to get away with his inability to form coherent sentences thus far because the Democrats’ flying monkeys in the mainstream media rush in and cover for all of his verbal faux pas. There have been countless “What he probably meant to say…” articles written by people who are still laughably referring to themselves as journalists.

It’s going to be exhausting for the MSM hacks to carry water for Biden if he’s on camera every day during the campaign. One wonders how long they can do it before their backs break and they say, “Ooh…there’s a Kennedy in the race.”

If it weren’t so sad for the country, I would take great pleasure watching this pathological liar word-barf his way into historical derision.